Police superintendent pushes to cut 911 cops' workload

McCarthy says freeing officers from nonessential calls is key part of anti-violence strategy

June 25, 2012|By David Heinzmann, Chicago Tribune reporter

Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy is seeking to change how some non-urgent 911 calls are handled in order to free up beat officers for other duties. (Alex Garcia, Chicago Tribune)

As Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy tries to streamline the way his department fights violent crime, he is stepping up his potentially controversial plan to reduce his officers' load of 911 calls.

Facing heat over a surge in homicides as he enters his second year in Chicago, McCarthy has expressed frustration over the pace of making the logistical and policy shift necessary to free up officers from what he considers nonessential responsibilities.

"I've been told we handle more types of calls for services than any other place in the country," McCarthy said.

He wants to keep officers from wasting their time with what he labeled the "my son won't eat his peas" type of call.

"We would set the policy. We're not responding to calls for A, B and C," McCarthy said, noting that he hasn't yet defined "what standard would we apply."

In order to do that, McCarthy has to work with the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, which handles dispatch duties, to eliminate the need to respond to some calls. The office and the Police Department have already tinkered with the system to allow police sergeants to help prioritize calls before they go to an officer, McCarthy said. Eliminating some calls from that stack of duties would be the next step.

Many big-city departments have systems to deal with calls deemed unworthy of having a police officer show up in person, but experts say there are often political consequences — from accusations of unresponsiveness to inevitable questions about shifting officers from safer areas to more troubled spots.

McCarthy said he plans to forge ahead with a plan to cut the number of calls cops answer by midsummer. Whether or not there are obstacles to getting it done, he said freeing officers to work their beats rather than chasing frivolous 911 calls is critical to making his strategy to reduce violence a success.

Since he took over the department in May 2011, McCarthy has removed several bricks in the Police Department's operational structure. Two patrol districts, two detective area headquarters and the entire rank of "assistant deputy superintendent" were eliminated.

He also disbanded two special units of police saturation teams — once the cornerstone of the department's anti-violence strategy. That decision is being questioned amid a roughly 35 percent increase in homicides this year.

Some department veterans say beat cops spend too much time responding to 911 calls and not enough time working the street to thwart gang conflicts sparking into shootings and murders. The superintendent doesn't disagree, but says the answer is in reducing the number of 911 calls rather than having special units who aren't tied to radios.

McCarthy publicly revealed his new approach to 911 calls in a June 15 Tribune story about the homicide rate and expressed dissatisfaction with subordinates in charge of enacting his plan.

The issue came up again Thursday during a City Council hearing on the police policy toward marijuana arrests when Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, asked McCarthy to comment on how 911 calls affect police resources.

"When are we going to address the cause that communications really don't require a police presence ... because we still work on the mantra that we will answer every call?" Ervin asked.

McCarthy said he was working on the issue and that the Police Department won't be able to limit the number of calls without the help and retraining of dispatchers.

His plan is to add another level to the current system for prioritizing calls, eliminating altogether some calls that typically require officers to respond. Some of the calls would be reassigned to the 311 system of nonemergency calls, and some would be deemed not worthy of even that response, he said.

The New York Police Department has a system of regularly evaluating what kinds of calls officers are answering, said McCarthy, who served as a deputy commissioner there before becoming the top cop in Newark, N.J., in 2006.

Other cities, such as Camden, N.J., have attempted to implement a system but run into political pushback from communities used to having a police response for any call, said Jon Shane, a criminal justice professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

What McCarthy is trying to do in Chicago is commonly referred to as "differential response" and is practiced in other big-city police departments, but it can become a political minefield, Shane said.

Reducing the kinds of calls police have to answer in person affects officers' workloads in safe neighborhoods as well as high-crime areas, Shane said. And in areas with low crime, eliminated categories of 911 calls may make up a higher percentage of the workload than in places riddled with shootings and drug dealing.

If officers in safe neighborhoods have less to do, police officials inevitably will want to move some of them to high-crime areas, a move that is sure to prompt political resistance from the more well-off areas faced with losing some of their cops.

"That's where the politically sensitive issues come into play," said Shane, a former captain in the Newark Police Department who retired before McCarthy arrived.

"What he's trying to do is the right thing, it's just that he'll be met with this political dissension that he won't be able to overcome," Shane said. "That's because U.S. policing is riddled with politics."